Odds & Ends

Part of my job every morning is to sift through news articles from around the globe and publish relevant hotel stories to the Web site. As you can imagine, that means stumbling on a good number of entertaining and amusing Web pages. Here’s the first installment of what will be a semi-regular feature of Mu & Mi, a compendium of Odds & Ends from around the Internet.

• The St. Louis Post-Dispatch asks its readers what they pilfer from hotels. Apparently, your housekeepers need to be paying close attention to what is actually in the mini-bars …

• Here’s a compelling podcast interview with Peter Jouvenal, a British expatriate and war photographer-turned-hotelier. Jouvenal (who once interviewed Osama bin Laden) now runs Gandamack Lodge in Kabul, Afghanistan, which rents body armor at the front desk …

• Kudos to Holiday Inn ("The official hotel of Major League Baseball") for adding a hotel booking link to the schedule pages of all MLB teams—but seems to me that it would have been worth the extra effort to make it so a click on a certain date and city would automatically navigate to a reservations page for that date and city, rather than having to re-enter the info …

• Allow me to join the chorus begging for the quick demise of the made-up marketing buzzword "staycation" …

• IHG has a Facebook application called "Hey, Get A Room!" That’s pretty much all it is—you download it and then use it to send messages to your kissy-face friends to, well, get a room. It only has three users. Props to IHG (seriously) for taking a stab at creating its own Facebook app, but maybe it should try again …

• A graphic design professional critiques the new Super 8 logo, declaring it an upgrade but "too now," meaning he thinks it will look dated sooner than later …

• MSN Money takes a look at what society would look like if (when?) gas hits US$10 per gallon. Hint: People won’t travel as much …